DisOrder Change History

This file documents recent user-visible changes to DisOrder.

Changes up to version 3.1

Server

The gap directive will no longer work. It could be restored if there is real demand.

Event Scheduling

It is now possible to schedule events to occur in the future. Currently the supported actions are playing a specific track, and changing a global preference (thus allowing e.g. random play to be turned on or off). See the schedule-* commands described in disorder(1).

Random Track Choice

This has been completely rewritten to support new features:

  • tracks in the recently-played list or in the queue are no longer eligible for random choice.
  • there is a new weight track preference allowing for non-uniform track selection. See disorder(1) for details.
  • there is a new configuration item replay_min defining the minimum time before a played track can be picked at random. The default is 8 hours (which matches the earlier behaviour).
  • recently added tracks are biased up; see new_bias and new_bias_age in disorder_config(5).

Web Interface

This has been largely rewritten. The most immediate benefits are:

  • the search page is integrated into the choose page, and includes links to parent directories.
  • if you try to do something you have insufficient rights for, instead of getting an error page or nothing happening, you are redirected to the login page.

Customizers should find their lives easier: the syntax is less onerous, it is possible to define macros to avoid repetition, and the documentation is less monolithic (see disorder.cgi(8) as a starting point).

Mail is now sent via the system sendmail program, though it remains possible to use TCP to connect to an SMTP server. See sendmail and smtp_server in disorder_config(5).

The web interface is now installed automatically. If you don't want it, use ./configure --without-cgi. If you want it in a non-default location, or no location for it is detected, set cgidir and httpdir on the ./configure command line.

Disobedience

There is now a new user management window. From here you can add and remove users or modify their settings.

Relatedly, the server will only allow remote user management if you set remote_userman to yes.

Miscellaneous

scripts/setup now honors command line options, and can set up network play as well as the local default sound device.

Bugs Fixed

ID Description
#2 Search results should link to directories
#6 Schedule tracks for a particular time
#10 Non-uniform track selection
#11 Bias random selection to newly added tracks
#13 Default encoding for debian setup scripts
#16 Cookie expiry causes user to be silently logged out and not subsequently redirected to login page
#20 Broken aliasing rules

Changes up to version 3.0.2

Builds --without-server should work again.

The web interface is a bit more liberal in the cookie value syntax it will accept.

Clients fail more gracefully if no password is available.

Changes up to version 3.0.1

Debian upgrades from 2.0.x should now work better.

Changes up to version 3.0

Important! See README.upgrades when upgrading.

Platforms And Installation

Mac OS X and FreeBSD are somewhat supported. There is now a bash script in scripts/setup which will automate the setup after make install.

Server

Users are now stored in the database rather than a configuration file.

The server now has a built-in list of stopwords and players, so only additions to these need be mentioned in the configuration file.

The default inter-track gap is now 0s.

How sound is played is now controlled via the new api configuration command. This also controls how the volume is set, which now works with ALSA as well as OSS.

A bug in the MP3 decoder was fixed (also in 2.0.4).

Web Interface

The web interface now uses cookies to remember user identity, and allows online registration of new users. Also it is no longer necessary to manually specify the URL of the web interface (but you can override it if you don't like the value it figures out).

It is possible to allow users to register via the web interface.

The web interface's browser support has been improved. It has been tested with Firefox 2, Safari 3, Konqueror 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.

Disobedience

A bug which would cause a crash if you attempt to rearrange the queue while no track was playing has been fixed. There is a new 'deselect all tracks' option, mirroring 'select all tracks.